Sutter, John August

Autograph letter signed ("J. A. Sutter" with an elaborate paraph), 1 page (10 1/2 x 8 1/8 in.; 268 x 207 mm) on a sheet of blue paper, Hock Farm, 7 September 1856, to Colonel James Lloyd La Fayette Warren ("My dear Colonel"); carelessly separated from integral blank just touching 5 characters at left margin, a few tiny pinholes at intersecting folds. Half blue morocco portfolio.

See Walton E. Bean, "James Warren and the Beginnings of Agricultural Institutions in California," in Pacific Historical Review 13 (1944): 361–75

A good letter in which Sutter apologizes to the nurseryman James Warren for a delay in delivering fruit and complains of market conditions. "Only last night I have received your esteemed favor of the 5th inst., and so it is entirely impossible to send you some Grapes & figs to day, and even not to morrow, because it takes some time to pack them and send them to Marysville, because the Steamers cannot more land here on account of the low stage of Water; but so soon as it possibly can be you will receive a supply, notwithstanding the bad luck which my Son had below, as just it happened that the Market has been innandated from los Angeles the very day he came down, and so it has been a failure, in Marysville I would have got the double what he has got in Sacramento." In a postscript Sutter notes that although the colonel's "letter is dated from San francisco I think you want the Grapes in Sacramento, and so I will direct them there."

James Warren "probably contributed more than any other single leader to the beginnings of the modern agriculture of American California. ... For an agriculture passing through a hazardous infancy as the stepchild of mining and ranching, Warren was the constantly solicitous godfather" (Bean). His colonelcy in the California militia was obtained for him by Sutter.